Have to rebuild my computer.

[Rockin Robbins]

One of the main reasons now that I stick with AMD/ATI cards is that they are supported "out-of-the-box" on Linux, as the "official" AMD driver is in the kernel.

That's what picked the MSI/AMD combination for the motherboard: Linux compatibility. Nvidia is just a matter of habit and perfect Linux compatibility so far.

It's a fun time to be building a computer, except that the RAM prices are crazy right now. I started looking at 16GB of RAM for $157.00 and now it's $174.99 on NewEgg, over $190 on Amazon. We're getting hard by some Thanksgiving, black Friday, Cyber-Monday, Christmas season specials so I'm holding my fire as I miss the ability to run Silent Hunter 4.

I really look forward to seeing what I want to do with Ubuntu. I think the wiser choice is to go for LTS editions rather than having sometimes wonky upgrade paths every six months. If cool stuff comes out I can usually integrate them into the LTS edition anyway.

My really great USB wireless card, (ALFA AWUS036HN with directional 7db antenna) freaks out with the random MAC address "security feature" of Ubuntu 17.04 and above. There's a hack but it still didn't fix Steam last I knew. I haven't been able to play with it, which is missing a lot of fun.

I really want to know who thought that random MAC addresses were a great security thing. From a network administrator perspective, a MAC whitelist is a feature that enhances my security. Linux high muckey-mucks, overthinking the problem, think crooks will sit in my driveway, sniff packets for a few hours, clone a MAC address and get on my network. That's plain silly!

Real crooks work from the security of their underground bunker in Bali-Bali, working in their underwear and don't need my MAC address. In the meantime, my MAC address whitelist keeps everyone I don't want off my wireless network very well, thank you.